Bring Back Death Penalty

Poll: Bring Back Death Penalty

Total Members Polled: 513

Yes: 47%
No: 53%
Author
Discussion

Ozzie Osmond

21,189 posts

245 months

Friday 5th October 2012
quotequote all
Chimune said:
You cant have it both ways by saying some convictions are better than others.
Of course you can. The burden of proof in criminal trials is "beyond reasonable doubt" not "beyond all possible doubt". This clearly leaves room for errors to be made which only come to light at a later date.

Twincam16

27,646 posts

257 months

Friday 5th October 2012
quotequote all
Zod said:
Digga said:
2. As we already stated. The evidence would need to be far stronger for DP. As I understand it, evidence for Stapleton would not have relied in DNA but in fact consisted of a far stronger case.

IMHO for all other murders, we'd still need to stick at life.
One glaring problem: we don't have verdicts of "quite guilty", "very guilty" and "absobloodylutely guilty".

We have only a simple "guilty" verdict.
Also, it doesn't alter the fact that some people confess to crimes they didn't commit, seemingly to gain a bit of infamy.

Think about 'Wearside Jack' - the guy who taunted police by pretending to be the Yorkshire Ripper, but wasn't. Also, most infamously, what about Timothy Evans? Had the misfortune to live in the same block of flats as John Reginald Christie. Christie murdered Evans's wife and daughter, and yet somehow the police got Evans to confess.

Evans was hanged, and yet the police didn't even bother searching the house and garden, where they would have found the bodies of Ruth Fuerst and Muriel Eady, murdered by Christie a few years earlier. Thanks to the police pinning it all on an innocent man and hanging him for it, Christie was let off scot-free even though he was once actually detained as a suspect, and he went on to kill four more women including his wife.

So even when we had the death penalty, even coming within a gnat's knickers of the gallows didn't make a serial killer even think twice.

Kermit power

28,634 posts

212 months

Friday 5th October 2012
quotequote all
Bedazzled said:
Because fundamentally life in prison serves no purpose, it's just a waste of resources because we can't stomach our responsibilities; and these days it can mean a comfortable existence to which they have no entitlement, imho. Execution provides timely justice for the victim's family and it's the most practical outcome for society as a whole.

Mistakes WILL happen, be under no illusion, but I think it's a necessary evil for the greater good rather like civilian casualties in war. When they do happen we need to learn from it and improve the criminal investigation process; it doesn't mean the punishment is wrong in principle, imo. It can also be abused by political pressures from time to time, as we have seen in the past, but it comes down to having the right checks and balances.

I don't think capital punishment compromises one's moral standing, we maintain our dignity by the seriousness with which cases are debated in a court of law, and by showing the courage of our convictions to implement justice. If a dog or wild animal attacks a person it should be put down humanely not hidden away in a kennel, out of sight out of mind, for the rest of its life; does that make us immoral?
The fact that you seem unable to distinguish between humans and wild animals is exactly the reason why we should be grateful that your way of thinking is the minority!

You talk about "timely justice for the victim's family", and being "the most practical outcome for society as a whole". OK, fair enough. Let's look at family...

We have a scenario where someone has been murdered. Let's assume that person has a 10 year old daughter. That 10yr old has just lost her father. In an instant, her world falls apart, and things will never, ever be the same again.

Then the police catch the murderer. They've got him bang to rights. The DNA evidence is 100% conclusive. There's a one in 4 billion chance that he's not the killer.

So, you're baying for the death sentence. You want him to hang so that little girl gets her "timely justice".

OK. Now you personally have to go and explain to the convicted murderer's 10 year old daughter why her father is going to be killed by the state because it's "the most practical outcome for society as a whole". Let's see you explain to a second little girl why she has to lose her father, when she's no more guilty of any crime than the victim's daughter.

Then, a few years down the line, when it comes to light that there was a fk up at the DNA labs and that actually the now-executed murderer was in fact completely innocent, you go and explain to his daughter that actually her father shouldn't have been executed in the first place, but hey, don't worry, little girl! Your innocent father's execution at the hands of the state was for the greater good, and we are going to learn lessons from it, so it's all fine, OK?

Then come back and report to us on how that little girl took it, and whilst you're at it, let us know how her life came on in the intervening years since you executed her father.

Chimune

3,163 posts

222 months

Friday 5th October 2012
quotequote all
Digga said:
o if I go down to Trafalgar Square tomorrow morning, tooled up, with intent, and take a life, with witnesses and CCTV and with the comensurate back-up of DNA evidence to boot I perhaps didn't do it?
Im sure you did do it, but perhaps you are mad and even the USA dont kill the insane. What happens now ?

Chimune

3,163 posts

222 months

Friday 5th October 2012
quotequote all
Ozzie Osmond said:
Of course you can. The burden of proof in criminal trials is "beyond reasonable doubt" not "beyond all possible doubt". This clearly leaves room for errors to be made which only come to light at a later date.
Beyond reasonable doubt isnt what Digger is discussing. He want dp for 'beyond all possible doubt'.

My point is, who get to decide when it moves from 'reasonable' to 'all possible'.
Jack Straw ?

Steameh

3,155 posts

209 months

Friday 5th October 2012
quotequote all
Bedazzled said:
I don't think capital punishment compromises one's moral standing, we maintain our dignity by the seriousness with which cases are debated in a court of law, and by showing the courage of our convictions to implement justice. If a dog or wild animal attacks a person it should be put down humanely not hidden away in a kennel, out of sight out of mind, for the rest of its life; does that make us immoral?
Disagree entirely. Killing someone is wrong no matter who they are, it is one of the fundamental principles of my morality.

If you take it to it's base level, answer this question; Do you believe that killing someone is ok?

Kermit power

28,634 posts

212 months

Friday 5th October 2012
quotequote all
Digga said:
Chimune said:
YOU dont seem to grasp that I dont trust YOUR or anyone elses judgement on which cases those are.
So if I go down to Trafalgar Square tomorrow morning, tooled up, with intent, and take a life, with witnesses and CCTV and with the comensurate back-up of DNA evidence to boot I perhaps didn't do it?
You did it, certainly. And 3 weeks after your execution, some clever techie in a crime lab somewhere is going to figure out how I used a new drug I'd developed to take control of your mind and force you to kill that person without even knowing you'd done it. You'll be exonerated!!! Of course, the news people might struggle slightly to interview you for your reaction.

Sounds outlandish, but it's exactly what the CIA spent 6 years trying to achieve with their MKultra project.

thinfourth2

32,414 posts

203 months

Friday 5th October 2012
quotequote all
You can scream as much as you like about justice etc and so on but there is another down side to the death penalty



Will get very rich from defending those that are to be put to death

Digga

40,207 posts

282 months

Friday 5th October 2012
quotequote all
Chimune said:
Digga said:
o if I go down to Trafalgar Square tomorrow morning, tooled up, with intent, and take a life, with witnesses and CCTV and with the comensurate back-up of DNA evidence to boot I perhaps didn't do it?
Im sure you did do it, but perhaps you are mad and even the USA dont kill the insane. What happens now ?
So is it worth the risk to further innocent lives to ever let me out?

Justices

3,681 posts

163 months

Friday 5th October 2012
quotequote all
thinfourth2 said:
You can scream as much as you like about justice etc and so on but there is another down side to the death penalty



Will get very rich from defending those that are to be put to death
Maybe there's no need to bring Blair to account for his actions. Is there worse punishment than wake up and see this beautiful flower each day.. and at 7am it won't be wearing makeup!!!!!

Digga

40,207 posts

282 months

Friday 5th October 2012
quotequote all
Justices said:
thinfourth2 said:
You can scream as much as you like about justice etc and so on but there is another down side to the death penalty



Will get very rich from defending those that are to be put to death
Maybe there's no need to bring Blair to account for his actions. Is there worse punishment than wake up and see this beautiful flower each day.. and at 7am it won't be wearing makeup!!!!!
biglaugh In this instance, I do actually think it very severe punishment. I wonder if it always looked so ghastly?

Chimune

3,163 posts

222 months

Friday 5th October 2012
quotequote all
Digga said:
Chimune said:
Digga said:
o if I go down to Trafalgar Square tomorrow morning, tooled up, with intent, and take a life, with witnesses and CCTV and with the comensurate back-up of DNA evidence to boot I perhaps didn't do it?
Im sure you did do it, but perhaps you are mad and even the USA dont kill the insane. What happens now ?
So is it worth the risk to further innocent lives to ever let me out?
Who mentioned letting you out ? You're a fookin loon !

Digga

40,207 posts

282 months

Friday 5th October 2012
quotequote all
Chimune said:
Digga said:
Chimune said:
Digga said:
o if I go down to Trafalgar Square tomorrow morning, tooled up, with intent, and take a life, with witnesses and CCTV and with the comensurate back-up of DNA evidence to boot I perhaps didn't do it?
Im sure you did do it, but perhaps you are mad and even the USA dont kill the insane. What happens now ?
So is it worth the risk to further innocent lives to ever let me out?
Who mentioned letting you out ? You're a fookin loon !
Ordinarily I ignore ad hominem attacks, but that one is justified. hehe

But even loons do sometimes get a chance of release, theoretically.

Kermit power

28,634 posts

212 months

Friday 5th October 2012
quotequote all
Bedazzled said:
People opposed to the death penalty always make it personal, citing emotional sob stories with little girls and suchlike, trying to tug on the heart strings, always asking "how would YOU feel?". I'm not baying for the death penalty, I think it's morally correct and practical from a dispassionate point of view. Equally a lot of people who are pro will argue the technology is much better these days, well yes it is and guess what they'll still get it wrong sometimes, regardless. If you can't stomach that, you have to vote no.
You cannot be dispassionate about choosing to end another human being's life, especially in such a premeditated, drawn out fashion.

Bedazzled said:
When I did jury service I remember another member of the jury saying things like "we can't find him guilty, just think of the impact on his poor family when he has to tell them what he did". Totally irrelevant as far as I'm concerned, he shouldn't have done it in the first place.
This I agree with, right up to the point of life imprisonment with no possibility of release.

Bedazzled said:
When you're on a jury you are responsible for that person's life and you will change it one way or another, if you erroneously put your fictional girl's father away for twenty years it's no different imho, you're just ducking your responsibility by saying "well, we can always let him out later and say sorry".
Here, though, is where we completely and utterly disagree. If you as a juror you find someone guilty and they are sentenced to life imprisonment on the strength of the evidence placed in front of you, and it later transpires that the police were corrupt, or a lab contaminated a DNA sample or one of any number of possible causes of a miscarriage of justice which you as a juror couldn't possibly know about at the time, then the state can compensate the victim of that miscarriage of justice, and you can know that things have been set right as far as is possible.

If, on the other hand, that person is sentenced to death on the strength of your verdict, and that verdict is later shown to be unsound for reasons you couldn't possibly have known about at the time, then that's it. The innocent man is still dead, and there's nothing that anyone can do to make it right. It still wasn't your fault, but you're still going to feel the guilt.

You think the return of the death penalty would serve as a deterrent to murder. Personally, I think the possibility of a death sentence would actually result in a far greater risk of murderers being found not guilty and going on to kill again where a jury would've found them guilty if they knew there wasn't the risk of a death sentence.

Bedazzled said:
We don't make wars illegal because a few innocent people die in them, we just accept it as a necessary evil and act with as much dignity as possible. It's just the way of things, I wouldn't want to go and explain to every German and Japanese family why we murdered their grand parents, especially those not involved in the war effort, but it was necessary in the bigger picture. It's strange that when a few thousand innocent civilians die in a war, people are capable of evaluating it rationally, but when it's about a individual little girl and her dad, all the wibbly-wobbly emotion comes to the fore.
No, we don't make wars illegal because innocent people die in them. Instead, we make the killing or injuring of innocent people in times of war illegal through the 4th Geneva Convention. It's not perfect, as we all know, because politics tend to get in the way of enforcement of sanctions all too often, but we certainly don't just accept it as a necessary evil!

Quite apart from that, the comparison is absurd. Yes, sometimes innocents get killed in warfare. There's a big difference between that and dispassionately killing them several months later though.

Lastly, the scale of a war means the approach has to be different. When countries go to war, things happen on a massive scale. With the death sentence, however, even with the laxest imaginable barriers on the passing of a death sentence, you'd be looking at at most a handful of cases a year. Even the US, with around 5 times our population only carries out around 40 executions a year.

With those sorts of numbers, you can easily contain the problem. So we have 5 to 10 people a year who we're going to lock up and throw away the key. Not the current namby pamby, out in 5 years life sentence, but a proper, locked in a small cell all day with no creature comforts and that's it for the rest of your life sort of life sentence.

A hellish sentence for those who deserve it, with the possibility of redemption if they're subsequently shown not to have deserved it, and for such tiny numbers of people that they whole "it'll be expensive to house them" argument is just irrelevant.

Ozzie Osmond

21,189 posts

245 months

Friday 5th October 2012
quotequote all
Kermit power said:
Not the current namby pamby, out in 5 years life sentence....
You really don't have a clue what you're talking about. Best get some facts or there's a real risk you'll continue to spout nonsense.

You could begin by googling names such as Myra Hindley, Ian Brady, Peter Sutcliffe and work on from there.

otolith

55,899 posts

203 months

Friday 5th October 2012
quotequote all
Ozzie Osmond said:
You could begin by googling names such as Myra Hindley, Ian Brady, Peter Sutcliffe and work on from there.
Here are a few more names of interest, perhaps less well known;

Mark Shirley
Derek Johnson
Mark Goldstraw
Joseph Ashman

Kermit power

28,634 posts

212 months

Friday 5th October 2012
quotequote all
Ozzie Osmond said:
Kermit power said:
Not the current namby pamby, out in 5 years life sentence....
You really don't have a clue what you're talking about. Best get some facts or there's a real risk you'll continue to spout nonsense.

You could begin by googling names such as Myra Hindley, Ian Brady, Peter Sutcliffe and work on from there.
Oh well done. You've managed to find some people who killed a lot. How about we add Fred West, Harold Shipman and Jack the Ripper? That way, you'll have pretty much a clean sweep of all the serial killers most people in this country have ever heard of.

It's easy to cherry-pick a couple of people serving whole life tariffs to try and prove a point, but considering fewer than 60 people have ever actually been sentenced to a whole life tariff, it's not really relevant, is it?

Add to that the fact that Sutcliffe and Brady are/were in high security mental hospitals rather than prisons for most of their incarceration, and considering you think I'm spouting nonsense, thoughts of pots and kettles spring to mind.

And you could move on to googling names such as Jon Venables, released after less than 8 years for the murder of Jamie Bulger, and subsequently jailed again for child porn offences, or if you prefer someone who was an adult at the time he committed his crime, how about Stephen Ayre?

Granted, he served 20 years (but then I never assumed anyone would take the 5 years quite so literally to try and make a point) before but nevertheless, released he was.

Within the year, he'd been found guilty of raping a 10yr old boy, and was put back inside, this time, thankfully, on a whole life tariff.

Well, he was for the next 4 years, at least. Then the evil won an appeal, and now has to serve a minimum of 10 years instead. rolleyes

I'm opposed to the death penalty, but when I see fkers like that with the chance of walking the streets again, it doesn't half stretch my opposition to the limit!

But anyway, enough individual examples. Let's get on to the bigger picture. The average term served by someone given a mandatory life sentence??? Less than 15 years. What a sick fking joke! Fifteen years in a cell for depriving someone else of their whole life. You might as well make it five for all the justice there is in that level of punishment.

groucho

12,134 posts

245 months

Friday 5th October 2012
quotequote all
Isn't state sanctioned murder, well, just another murder? Let's hang the head of state!

I'm sure some murderers feel wholly justified about committing some murders. As justified as the state feels, maybe?

TheHeretic

73,668 posts

254 months

Friday 5th October 2012
quotequote all
otolith said:
Ozzie Osmond said:
You could begin by googling names such as Myra Hindley, Ian Brady, Peter Sutcliffe and work on from there.
Here are a few more names of interest, perhaps less well known;

Mark Shirley
Derek Johnson
Mark Goldstraw
Joseph Ashman
That is an issue of lenient sentencing, not 'execute or not'.

Sprouts

865 posts

188 months

Friday 5th October 2012
quotequote all
Following on from my "No" earlier, I'd like to add, that anyone who thinks it should be brought back is a complete lunatic who's wish is to go back to the dark ages. I cannot understand some folk, I really can't.